SRI International to Build Molecule Research Library for NIH; Mary Tanga Comments

SRI International has been awarded a a $4.5 million contract to establish a library intended to contain thousands of metabolites for use by researchers at the National Institutes of Health.

NIH intends for the Metabolite Standards Synthesis Center to help prepare molecules for metabolomics researchers and be accessible to the scientific community, SRI announced Monday.

Metabolomics research involves the study of chemical reactions taking place in the body to sustain life.

“Currently, more than half of all human metabolites are unavailable, and many metabolites have never been synthesized or their structures have only been speculated, and therefore these important molecules are not available to researchers,” said Mary Tanga, director of the Center for Chemical Biology at SRI Biosciences and principal investigator f0r SRI’s Metabolite Standards Synthesis Center.

“Researchers can pursue the answers to important questions if they actually have the compounds,” she added.

The contract is part of a multicomponent program by the NIH Common Fund Metabolomics Program, which is intended to help increase metabolomics research capacity in the U.S. through infrastructure expansion, training, technology development and reference standards synthesis.

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